How Vikings coach Kevin O'Connell talked Joshua Dobbs through a comeback win, seven seconds at a time

Seconds after Brandon Powell spiked the football he'd caught from Joshua Dobbs for the game-winning touchdown in the Vikings' 31-28 victory in Atlanta on Sunday, assistant equipment manager Adam Groene walked behind Kevin O'Connell, retrieving the headset that bore the brunt of the coach's own celebration.

"Yeah, I spiked it. I may have pulled a muscle in my neck. I'm not sure what I did," O'Connell said. "That was all [Brandon Powell]. Everything that we had as an organization being put forward, regardless of the circumstance, just trying to get this one. This one will be special to me for a long time."

The headset flew like a mortarboard cap as the coach celebrated at the end of a week that had tested the Vikings academically and emotionally as much as it had physically. By the end of the win, where Dobbs played all but 11 snaps after joining the Vikings on Tuesday night, team officials were privately glowing about what O'Connell and his staff had done. "I mean, we kind of knew," one said, "but this was special."

Two former Vikings quarterbacks, both with NFL MVP awards to their names, were less reserved about it.

"It's just a phenomenal job done by Kevin in making the offense work," said Vikings Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton, whom O'Connell invited to speak to the team in Atlanta on Saturday night. "Kevin had to call the plays and put [Dobbs] in the right positions. How do you do that in five days?"

Said 2002 NFL MVP Rich Gannon: "It's a real credit to [Dobbs], and a credit to Kevin and the coaching staff for getting a guy ready to play on just a handful of days."

The Vikings decided to extend Kirk Cousins' contract after hiring O'Connell last year, rather than trading the quarterback away, in what amounted to a bet that Cousins would play at a higher level under his former Washington QB coach than he had under Mike Zimmer. It appeared to be working through their first 25 games together, when they'd gone 17-8 and Cousins was leading the league in passing yards.

When Cousins tore his right Achilles tendon at Lambeau Field on Oct. 29, it started a week that would challenge the coaching staff's quarterback development skills in a different way.

On Monday, an MRI confirmed the team's fears Cousins would need surgery, sending the Vikings scrambling for quarterback help before Tuesday's trade deadline. By Tuesday, they had traded for Joshua Dobbs, hoping he could learn enough of the game plan to back up rookie Jaren Hall, who'd thrown his first NFL regular-season pass the previous week and would need much of the offensive staff's time.

O'Connell, a former QB himself, had prepped quarterbacks to run an NFL offense in short order before, but never while also readying a rookie to start. After 25 regular-season games with Cousins, he got his 18th win in his 26th game on Sunday with a quarterback he'd only coached in snippets of time.

"That's the crazy thing," O'Connell said.

Quarterbacks coach Chris O'Hara was getting Hall ready, with O'Connell spending time with the rookie too. It was Grant Udinski, assistant quarterbacks coach, who was with Dobbs — "Josh with his helmet on, hearing plays, going through cadence, walking through a lot of those things," O'Connell said.

Dobbs graduated from Tennessee with a 4.0 GPA and a degree in aerospace engineering; he is, in other words, the rare quarterback who can look at an NFL playbook, say it's not rocket science and mean it.

The fact he'd started eight games for the Cardinals this year meant the speed of a regular-season game wouldn't be foreign to him. By the weekend, he'd told coaches he was ready to run anything they'd put on the call sheet for the Falcons game. "Whether it's no-huddle, whether it's tempo, whether it's our game plan call — whatever it is, I got it," he said Sunday. "If they started pulling stuff from [organized team activities], I might be a little handcuffed out there, but if you put it on the call sheet, I got it."

The Vikings had to test the theory just 11 snaps into the game when Hall left with a concussion. "My job in that moment is to eliminate the chaos," O'Connell said Monday.

He spent more of the game in Dobbs' earpiece than he does with Cousins, trying to provide seven-second bursts of coaching before his headset cut off with 15 seconds left on the play clock while trying to resist his own temptation to overcoach. TV timeouts, O'Connell said, gave him more time to gauge how Dobbs felt navigating the offense.

"I started to get a pretty good feel with where he was at, and his ability to know formations and the intent of certain plays," O'Connell said. "It allowed me to get a little bit deeper into the footwork, what to do with his eyes and what I was thinking as the play-caller, which is pretty similar to what I would do in a lot of situations with Kirk."

The Vikings handled the day with the efficiency O'Connell had stressed all week, committing just one accepted penalty for 4 yards and substituting quickly enough to buy extra seconds for the coach to talk to Dobbs. On T.J. Hockenson's 29-yard catch-and-run in the third quarter, guard Dalton Risner was the first person to pick up the tight end so the Vikings could get back in the huddle.

"You highlight it, you talk about it, you emphasize it and you just hope it comes to life," O'Connell said. "That's what allowed it: the substitution coaches being on top of it, [saying], 'Hey, I need this guy. I need this guy,' making sure we're in and out of the huddle. Because every moment we broke that huddle and the quarterback wasn't talking to the guys in the huddle, I was going to use that time to try to help."

A decade ago, when the Vikings tried to get Josh Freeman ready to start 15 days after signing him, the result was an infamous Monday night disaster. In 2016, they waited a week to play Sam Bradford after trading for the seventh-year QB in the wake of Teddy Bridgewater's knee injury, viewing veteran Shaun Hill as the safer option for the season opener in Tennessee.

Cousins, at times, has referenced the movie "Argo," quoting Ben Affleck's character's line about deploying "the best of the bad options." Faced with the predicament of turning from a rookie starter to a veteran who hadn't practiced all week, the Vikings traversed a tightrope that has snapped under many teams. O'Connell credited Dobbs and his coaches on Monday. Those who'd watched it raved about the head coach who oversaw it.

"Josh should get a lot of credit, but Kevin should get credit, too," Tarkenton said. "If I was in Kevin's position, I would throw my hands up."

Star Tribune staff writer Chip Scoggins contributed to this report.